Have you ever been haunted by a memory? I was for the longest time haunted by the color blue and not until I turned 19 did I understand why. Eventually I came to understand that a combination of events caused me to go through a period of remembering things that I had forgotten. These event included me becoming sexually active, my older sister and her two-year-old daughter moving in with me, going to school full time for nursing, and working a full-time job at a nursing home caring for elderly people. Looking back now I believe that the enormous stress from all of these things combined is what caused my mind to regurgitate up the memories of what I call “the blue room” one evening.
On one particular evening after my college classes I came home to a dark apartment that was colored by the evening light and that color was blue. When I first walked into the apartment and saw this my breath caught sharply in my chest and I found that I could not take another breath. A tingling then burning sensation went over my entire skin and I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of danger that led into a feeling of terror. My heart raced so hard that I could hear it in my head thundering away, and yet I could not take a breath. Within a moment I was on my knees on the floor grasping at my throat trying to will myself to breathe. Everything turned dark in my eyes and I felt my body fall over and in that moment of darkness I was taken back to the blue room. In my minds eye I saw myself first from the outside and then was drawn inside of myself at the age of two years old. When this happened I was no longer aware of my body or being in my apartment I was transported back to my two-year-old self. In the memory I stood in the bathroom naked and crying with blood running down my leg from my crotch. All I could feel was pain and a burning feeling between my legs as I stared at the toilet. In that moment all I wanted to do was go pee, but I was afraid to because I knew it would hurt, so all I could do was stand there and cry.
After I saw what I did I started to wake up and I found myself laying on the floor of my apartment with the door partly open. At the time I had no idea what all of this meant or what the hell had happened to me. All I knew was that it felt like I had actually physically been back there again. Back where I wasn’t sure at that time, but over the course of several months more and more of these incidences occurred until I was forced to go to therapy to try to find answers. Over time as I spoke to a therapist it became clear that what I was experiencing was called “repressed memory syndrome” along with “PTSD” (post traumatic stress disorder). During therapy I learned that there were certain things in my life that were acting like triggers for these memories to resurface. Every single thing that had been going on in my life was brought to a screeching halt as I dealt with the trauma from the abuse. Needless to say the next year of my life became a living nightmare from which I felt like there was no escape.
In that year I came to understand that between the ages of two and three years old I was sexually molested by my grandfather. The reason why blue was a trigger for me for years was because the bathroom was blue or at least the shower curtain. I remember quite clearly hiding in this bathroom and locking the door to avoid being touched by him. Most of my memories are about laying in this tub curled up in a ball trying to be quiet while everything around me looked blue from the light coming through the window that shown through the curtain. This horrific violation caused me to hate this man with every ounce of my being and that hate was all consuming. Over the next several years this hate that I had inherited from this situation created a deep rift within me making it difficult for me to be able to create close or intimate relationships with other people. Admittedly trusting people was my number one problem that I had in those days and still have to a point now if I’m honest with myself. After your molested or raped, which I have also been trust becomes an idea that you feel like you can’t afford anymore.
I didn’t start making real progress with my anger until a conversation one day with my grandmother. She started talking about her husband my grandfather and she revealed things to me about him that I was completely unaware of. She spoke to me about how his father beat him so hard as a child that he lost his hearing on his right side. When I asked her why his father used to beat him she told me of another story about something that she realized after they were married, which was the fact that he was gay. She further explained that she believed that him being gay as a child was most likely why his father beat him. When she told me this story all I could see is this sweet little gay boy in my head who had been beaten to the point where he had become the monster that molested me. Seeing this in my head upset me so much I had to leave the room and find a place to privately cry for that little boy. I understand that his suffering does not justify his actions, but I chose to forgive him because of that little gay boy that he once was. All he had learned to do from his father was to take by violating others.
In that moment of understanding him I realized that hate was contagious like a disease, which was passed from his father to him and from him to me. I also understood that I no longer wanted to be one more link in the chain of that disease. When I forgave him I made the choice to accept and understand that his father’s hate and his own self hate had made him into a monster, and that my hate would do the same to me if I let it. There have been many times since this first initial lesson about hate that I’ve had to revisit the reality of this truth. Yes, there have been periods where my hate has turned me into a monster for a moment and I’ve had to once again cure myself of that disease. The truth is that almost every monster that exists was once a small child that unfortunately broke, because of the actions or inactions of others. Accepting this I realized that my judgment needed correction and that I needed to allow myself to view the world in a different way. Not merely as black and white or right and wrong, but more through the lens of cause and effect. Anger is such an easy disease to pass along to everyone we meet. It’s a disease that turns all of us into monsters capable of anything at anytime.
Maybe instead of venting anger and hate all the time and embracing a victim stance with everything we should take a road less traveled called forgiveness. It took a long time for me to accept what happened to me and that I was strong enough to survive it and break that chain once and for all and never pass it along again. One of my main goals with writing is that maybe my words can help other people to break this chain as well. Maybe my words will draw a map and maybe that map will help other people to be free of certain things holding them back. My soul whispers to me these days and it says, “You survived to help others to do the same.” In this I will become the divine’s activist and I am proud of the scars that are a part of me and they prove to me daily that I can survive anything I set my mind to. My prayer today goes to those being abused and to those that have survived abuse and to those that thrive after abuse. May you never let anger and hate consume you and may you always know that your scars are beautiful and powerful.
Until next time…
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